


Turritopsis

by HapaxLegomenon



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch Era, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Pre-Canon, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 06:38:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10714203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HapaxLegomenon/pseuds/HapaxLegomenon
Summary: Genji dies with his dragons, and lives, and dies again.





	Turritopsis

**Author's Note:**

> This oneshot contains references to Japanese funereal customs, which I hope I portrayed accurately.

The funeral happens on a Tuesday. Genji knows he looks good in a black suit, but for the first time, he hardly cares. The shirt is rumpled and he picks bones out of ash in a grey daze. A shifting of soot and the dull tapping of chopsticks are the soundtrack to the afternoon, broken by a quiet, desperate curse from Hanzo when his chopsticks touch Genji’s and a piece of bone falls back into the ash. Their father smells like clean charcoal and incense and Genji coughs once. He’s swiftly reprimanded by a great uncle, a stinging chopstick to the ear, and his dragons stir sullenly as Hanzo waves the elder away.

“Careful, Genji,” Hanzo murmurs. His grip is just a little too tight, and his hand shakes almost imperceptibly, but Genji feels it. Genji’s breath stutters, and the hand around his bicep squeezes and releases. They fill the urn with ash and Genji stays close beside Hanzo’s arm as his brother carries their father carefully, reverently home.

*

Genji is full of restlessness, the bone-deep kind of itch that drives him into the seediest bars and sweatiest beds. His dragons bubble and boil under his skin, chasing each other through his nerves and blood vessels and making his muscles sing with unspent energy. When they were children, Genji would lie awake for hours, blankets thrown off and rolling in the bed, unable to turn his body off and sleep. Hanzo was a refuge, then, projecting calm and control even as a child, and on the worst nights, when the castle was asleep and Genji was awake, he’d creep into his brother’s room, bouncing onto the thin futon and wrapping himself up in the cool aura of Hanzo’s dragons, letting Hanzo’s soft voice, almost-impatient, exasperated and affectionate, draw out his twitchy energy. Then, he could rest.

It never occurred to Genji, as a child, that Hanzo was never asleep, either, on those nights. Always awake, and waiting. 

It’s been well over a decade -- nearly two -- since the last time Genji tiptoed into Hanzo’s room in the middle of the night. The relationship between boys, even brothers, is very different from that of men. Nevertheless, a week after their father’s funeral, Genji finds himself walking the familiar path through deserted hallways. Drink has made him unsteady and he sways and staggers, leaving an uneven trail of sweat-damp handprints on the paper walls. Genji opens the sliding door with a low scraping screech, despite its best efforts at silence, and Hanzo sits with his back to the entry, legs crossed and hands folded in meditation. He sighs like a winter breeze as Genji trips his way through the door. 

“We’ve spoken about this, Genji,” Hanzo says, clipped and controlled. Lost in a haze of grief and whisky, Genji doesn’t notice the way his brother’s posture stiffens, or the icy-blue glow behind his eyelids. He drops gracelessly onto the floor, facedown. Hanzo moves the fluttering ends of Genji’s scarf off of his lap, and in return -- retaliation, maybe, or affection -- Genji rolls to press his face into the rough weave of Hanzo’s pants.

Above him, Hanzo sighs again. “You are interrupting my meditation,” he says. A soft pressure on Genji’s shoulder belies the gruff tone, and anyway, grumpy Hanzo is familiar territory.

Genji thinks about teasing, about poking and prodding at the buttons that only a younger brother knows. He thinks about strobe lights and neon shots and sweaty gyrations, and he thinks about swords and stretches and shuriken.

“Father’s dead,” he says, his mind full of ash and bone and the cloying scent of illness.

“Yes,” Hanzo answers. Genji’s dragons ripple under his skin, flashing in the tattoo that coils down his right arm. They’re humming, straining for their brothers in Hanzo’s soul, and Genji wonders if Hanzo can feel it too. He thinks about the words, a green glow on the edge of a sword, feels them swelling up within him, ready to burst --

“Genji.” Hanzo’s voice snaps like a whip, and Genji’s dragons recoil, fading back into the place between his ribs. They roll within him, belly-up in supplication, and Genji mirrors them, flipping onto his back to stare through hazy eyes up at Hanzo’s ceiling. From his peripheral vision, Hanzo’s face is cast in shadow, carving deep lines around his eyes and mouth. Genji breathes incense through his nose.

“There’s a kind of jellyfish,” Genji says, the thought striking him as of the utmost importance. “It’s immortal. Never dies unless it’s killed.” Turritopsis dohrnii, he thinks. It’s a random bit of bar trivia, picked up who knows when. A jellyfish that flips back and forth, ages in both directions. When things go wrong, the jellyfish reverts to a polyp, a planktonic bud, and begins life again. 

Hanzo finally breaks his stiff pose. Not much, only the barest of movements, but he exhales and his shoulders curve forward. After another moment -- Hanzo breathing, Genji watching -- he clenches his jaw and runs a hand down his face. Genji starts to reach up, but it’s a swiftly aborted motion and his hand falls silently back to his side. 

“You look tired, anija.” 

Tired isn’t the right word. Exhausted, maybe. Stretched and compressed, battered, stressed. Genji hits upon an idea -- “You need a drink. Let’s get a drink.” 

He starts to sit up, but Hanzo pins him down with one hand. Genji flails ineffectually for a moment, but his head spins and he slumps against the floor. He squints up at Hanzo’s face.

Hanzo’s jaw is tight and angry again, and he still hasn’t looked at Genji once. With all the authority of the new lord of Hanamura behind his voice, Hanzo declares, “This cannot continue, Genji. Things must change.” The dragons echo in his words. 

Our father is dead, Genji thinks. How much more has to change?

*

On the fiftieth day, Genji brushes dirt from his pants and kneels in front of the altar. Wisps of incense curl towards the ceiling, and below the tapestry sits a single, framed photograph, draped in black ribbon. 

The first period of mourning is over. Business can resume as normal within the castle again. Within the clan, under Hanzo’s direction. For Genji, the forty-nine days of separation mean next to nothing. His father is still dead. He is still skirting the sides of a criminal empire -- Genji knows that the elders disapprove of him, but he doesn’t care. He wants more from life than the path of the criminal. Of the assassin.

He hears the door open behind him, and footsteps walk across the room towards him. He doesn’t turn. Strange to be in front, for once, after a boyhood spent eagerly trailing behind his brother, but Genji knows the sound of Hanzo’s footsteps better than his own heartbeat. Always a source of security, and he breathes deep as he presses his forehead to the floor. Hanzo stops behind him, and Genji straightens back up.

“I am almost finished,” Genji assures his quiet brother. 

Hanzo’s reply, when it comes slightly too late, is a strangled sigh of, “Yes, Genji.”

Genji starts to stand, and then there’s the unmistakable sound of a blade being drawn. Before he can turn, a question just forming on his lips, he feels a searing, biting pain over his shoulder, across his back. Genji stumbles, and he _screams_.

*

Genji doesn’t know how he got away. He doesn’t know how he came to be here, gasping and sobbing for breath, bleeding into the cracks between cobblestones. He can’t feel his body, every part of him twisting together in anguish, and he can’t tell where he ends and where his dragons begin.

His dragons. He reaches for them, desperate. 

He hears a voice nearby, two voices, maybe more, with abrupt accents and languages he doesn’t understand. His body is dying, he is acutely aware, his body is dying. He reaches for his dragons.

Something is wrong. Something feels fundamentally _wrong_. Genji opens his mouth and tries to scream again, but his throat is burned and shattered and no sound comes out.

Genji falls into darkness.

*

He’s heard of Overwatch, before. Everyone has. The gallant heroes who pulled humanity out of the Omnic Crisis, overseers of peace. The Shimada clan had paid only the barest attention to them. Genji, who didn’t even want to fight for his family, ducking under laws and bribing away others, found the concept of fighting with the extra layer of wading through bureaucracy almost laughable.

And yet, here he is, now, in a brand new robotic body that Overwatch gave him. It hurts -- everything hurts -- and he wants to rip the cybernetics out by their roots. Pull the tubes from his body. He pictures bleeding out on the pristine white floor, but he knows Overwatch will only bring him back. 

He’s an asset, after all.

There are two sides to Overwatch, and they stand before him in the too-bright training room, waiting for a test of his abilities. Four people -- two in Overwatch blue, both blond, both pale, both with easy smiles and promises that set Genji on edge. The strike commander and the doctor. Mercy, they call her. Genji had laughed at the irony of the name, before, when she was welding his nerves to copper wire, because if she had any mercy at all, she’d have let him die. 

The other two dress in black, the dark commander with the scarred face and the tanned cowboy who can’t seem to last ten minutes without shifting his weight or jiggling his foot or whispering to his boss. Blackwatch. Black ops, secrecy, questionable morality. 

The symbolism isn’t lost on Genji. 

“We’re very curious to see your progress,” the blond commander says. Morrison, Genji remembers, from the posters. “Dr. Ziegler has assured us that you should be fully fit for combat. It’s just a matter of seeing what you can do, and where your talents can best be used.” It’s slimy, evasive wording, but Genji grew up yakuza. He knows all the tricks.

The Blackwatch commander laughs a harsh bark before Genji can respond. “Look, kid,” he says bluntly. “We wanna take down the Shimada empire. We need you to do it. You in?”

Genji makes no promises.

*

His body is gone, carved away to a handful of muscle and bone attached to a single intact arm. Everything from his collarbone to his ribs, gone. 

His tattoos are gone.

It’s weeks, or months, maybe, into his formal Overwatch training. Over a year since he died and was rebuilt, and Genji hasn’t tried to summon his dragons. He’s scared to even reach for them, to feel if they’re there. 

“You know, I’ve heard a thing or two about the Shimada heirs,” Reyes says one day as Genji trains with the cowboy, leaning back in his chair with an affectation of nonchalance and eyes as sharp as a hawk. “Rumour has it they can summon dragons. That true?” 

Genji considers and doesn’t speak. 

Reyes is sneaky and ruthless and doesn’t try to hide it. In a backwards way, that makes Genji trust him. At least he can see what he’s getting himself into -- it’s better than Overwatch’s veneer of gentility. Besides, Blackwatch operates in the dark. Genji is a ninja. He doesn’t do spotlights.

(Not anymore, a voice in the back of his mind whispers, and the vents in his shoulder pop in agitation.)

“Whaddya mean, dragons?” The cowboy asks, tilting his hat back with the tip of his gun. He has an easy laugh and an easier grin, and Genji likes him despite his better judgement. Something twists under Genji’s skin, something _alive_ , around the remnants of his ribcage, and he smiles inside his mask, decision made.

“Stand back,” he says, the words robotic and distorted. He draws his sword and he speaks the words. The burst of hot air, from his lungs up through the phantom sensation of his arms and through his sword, is achingly familiar. The world glows green, thrown into sharp neon relief, and his dragon roars as it follows the path of his sword, resonating in his ears and soul. 

One dragon. Genji gropes desperately for its brother, clawing and tearing at the secret parts of his psyche. He hasn’t felt the second dragon since he died, but the confirmation… it hurts. It hurts more than the betrayal and the metal grafted to his skin and bones. His dragon keens for its fallen brother. It’s an awful, awful sound. Genji keens with it, and he finds himself on his knees.

Hanzo couldn’t cope with Genji’s screaming, when he died. Genji remembers bits and pieces -- he remembers Hanzo clawing at his face, burning his throat and lungs with his dragons, yelling at Genji to stop screaming, to stop, stop, stop --

“Genji?”

\-- stop _stop_ \--

“Genji!”

The merciful angel rebuilt him from the inside out. With a synthetic larynx, Genji can scream without stopping. There’s no flesh lungs to beg for air, no vocal cords to get raw and sore. His dragon screams, too.

Someone touches his shoulder -- the flesh one -- and without thinking Genji swings his sword in a frenzied attack. McCree shouts in surprise and barely manages to deflect the sloppy strike with the butt of his gun. Genji drops his sword, and the dragon dissipates in a mist of green, fleeing back into Genji’s ruined body. Genji curls around it and feels it crying for its lost brother.

“Hey, hey,” McCree is saying in a voice meant to comfort. “What’s wrong? You hurt? You want me to call the Doc or somethin’? Man, if that ain’t half cool, though. Where’d you learn to do that?”

Genji’s chest is heaving, like he’s breathless in exertion or anger or fear, even though his faceplate is still on, his life support still ticking away as if everything is normal. It’s a purely psychological reaction, then. Now that he’s looking, he feels the hole in his soul and it burns like the fires of hell. He pictures Hanzo, standing next to him at their father’s funeral, standing over him with his sword drawn and Genji’s blood splattered over his chest, and his dragon growls and snaps its teeth within him.

“Reyes,” Genji says, with the force of the dragon echoing in his voice. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees McCree rear back in surprise, and the opposite reaction from Reyes, leaning forward with a calculating look. “Reyes. I will do it.”

Reyes runs his tongue over his teeth and taps his knee. “Do what, mijo?”

The dragon purrs agreement when Genji says, “I will help you destroy my family.” The last word tastes like ash in his ruined mouth, and he wishes he could spit it out, to grind it into the floor under his armoured foot.

Reyes’ eyebrows disappear up under his beanie, and Genji kneels on the floor and lets the bubbling anger drown him. “What made you change your mind?” The commander asks, voice careful, and Genji feels the flash of green behind his eyes.

The hole within his soul aches and festers and Genji drowns in it. Hatred, anger, fear, grief coil up tight and hot around his body, and with every artificial beat of his heart he sees uncles, great aunts, grandparents.

Brothers.

“I hate them,” he snarls, and the dragon snarls with him.

**Author's Note:**

> I saw a fan theory that Genji originally had two dragons, too, before Hanzo killed one, and it broke my heart.
> 
> (Then I saw [this rebuttal](https://twitter.com/novalillies/status/855217696253722624) and I laughed out loud.)
> 
> ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/@paxlegomenon))


End file.
